Maybe everything would have been simpler if I hadn’t convinced myself that I had talent.

I believed from an early age, without a shadow of doubt, that when I graduated from high school I’d move to Mexico City, start film school, and, when they viewed my first exercises, all the teachers would prostrate themselves before me, immediately recommending me for a study-abroad scholarship. By way of a thesis, I’d write and direct a movie short; a stunningly clear-cut piece of fiction about a teenage relationship, based on my time with Natalia, which would win all the Mexican prizes. And after that, a whole raft of opportunities would present themselves. I’d film in virgin rainforests and Asian cities with mile-high skyscrapers; I’d be known for my ability to delve beneath the banal. Thanks to my professional success, I’d have close relationships with women from an incredible variety of backgrounds who would all secretly be captivated by my charms, but it would never go any further: they would be sublime, platonic loves that, at most, would involve a kiss because, deep down, I’d still be in love with Natalia and dreaming of returning to Cuernavaca with a Palme d’Or and a Venice Golden Lion to swallow my pride and beg her to come back to me.

All those ambitions, chewed over during endless evenings watching the rain—in the days when it used to rain—set the scene for my disillusion. At eighteen, I was turned down for film school, and again at nineteen, and at twenty. I convinced my parents to fund a diploma at a private school that had a reputation for “putting you in touch with industry people,” which meant being used as unpaid labor in the production of infomercials. Years later, I found a job in the organization of a film festival and for a time the contact with directors and actresses allowed me to reassume my air of misunderstood creative artist. But cinema is such a collective activity that the myth of the solitary genius very soon falls flat: by my thirtieth birthday, all I wanted was to save enough money to be able to afford a place to live that didn’t involve sharing with four other bastards just as depressed and empty as myself, even if it was in a neighborhood with no cafés or restaurants.

I met Lucía at an event during the film festival; an openbar cocktail party in the courtyard of a private university, with smoked salmon canapés, dubious mezcal, and nineties music that everyone danced to ironically. Lucía poked fun at the general ambience, the festival, and the world of cinema before asking me what I did for a living. When I shamefacedly explained, she gave a hoot that made me think she was drunk. Half an hour later we snuck off to a secluded area of the venue and kissed in a corridor smelling of cat piss.

Lucía persuaded me to leave the party and accompany her and her friends to another in an apartment in Colonia Narvarte. In the cab on our way there, her friends covertly grilled me as though I was a pretender for her hand. And, truth be told, there was something promising and harmonious about that fortuitous encounter; an outburst of desire and coquetry that, in my imagination, might lead to a stable relationship.

By the time we got to her place—at seven in the morning—we were so tired and drunk that we didn’t even go through the pantomime of fucking: we flopped onto the bed in what we were wearing, with an unbearably needy cat purring loud as a truck a few centimeters from the pillow.

I make this summary after midnight, napping for short periods and then continuing. I wake four or five times during the night, bathed in sweat, too hot under the blankets. On each occasion, I retain only the final images of a dream, isolated scenes, without the least hint of a plot or explanation: a play that had to be watched from a hot-air balloon, a female cab driver who takes the long way around, a yellowing garden full of tlacuaches—their elusive ratlike tails electrifying the landscape.

The last time I wake it’s still dark, although dawn isn’t far off: it’s a sneaking suspicion beyond the branches of the tulip tree, an indistinct murmur beginning to take form. I decide not to sleep any longer and walk noiselessly to the kitchen, where I eat half a small papaya, sitting in the place usually occupied by my mother. My gut is making strange noises, like a building about to collapse. The constipation has morphed from an annoyance to a metaphor: a complete inability to process anything, the grip of a dog’s jaws on another dog’s neck. Maybe the fruit will help.

The sun begins to come up and the first birds appear, warbling frantically, as though welcoming the last morning of planet Earth. My back feels stiff and there’s a promise of pain to come in the upper vertebrae of my neck, just about where the spinal column connects to the cranium. I stand up, rotate my head slowly in wide circles then move it from side to side, like I’m saying no to life.

Back in my bedroom, I consider the possibility of jacking off, but to be honest, my libido has been at a very low ebb for ages.

It’s strange. Like most teenagers, I was obsessed with sex, which meant I was incapable of leaving my dick alone for more than six hours, and for a long time the same was true in my adult life, with the associated negative effects on my relationships, my emotional stability, my reputation, and my work. These days, all I feel is a stone in my gut and the need to take Permutal in order to tolerate my body. My body is the enemy; it doesn’t trust itself, eyes itself suspiciously as though awaiting the traitorous shot that will end it all. My body is the beast and the zookeeper, and the children whose mouths form an oh of surprise when they see the gorilla hurl its shit around, and the man at the hot-dog cart, and the clouds too: my body is the dull, dark clouds through which pass crazed, squawking grackles, while down below a man shouts: Get your antifungal nail cream here.

Lack of sleep. That must be the problem.

I decide I need to do something to ward off the possibility of becoming addicted, which is no joke. I’ve been addicted to a number of substances in the past and I don’t want to go through that again. Today I’ll try not to take Permutal and go back to ibuprofen and acupuncture. I might be able to find a Chinese doctor here in Cuernavaca who will apply a plaster smelling of egg that will miraculously cure me in an instant. Or better still, the psychiatrist who treated Helena Paz Garro will offer me the same prescription she gave Helenita when she was living in isolation with her mother, Elena, near the ruins of Teopanzolco; some nonaddictive pill with a pearly coating that will lighten me up. But in the meantime…

At 7:15 in the morning, before Mom and Dad wake, I leave the house quietly and take a cab downtown, carrying an old backpack rescued from the closet, containing nothing more than ten ibuprofen, a bottle of water, and a detective novel.

Downtown, everything is still shut; there are women sweeping the dust and ash from their corresponding stretch of sidewalk and then going back indoors, satisfied to have set a piece of the world in order. A street cleaner whistles a cumbia, watched by the indolent eyes of a dog that lazily moves aside to allow him to pass. Farther off, someone raises the metal gate of a shoe store and, without warning, I feel a new stab of pain around my collarbone.

I sit on the steps in Plazuela del Zacate. A drunk passes by, loudly singing a song about lost love, and behind me, a cabdriver stops to clean his windshield, which is coated in the sort of smutty dust that’s been covering everything for the last six days. A man selling pan dulce also passes on a bicycle and I buy an instant coffee from him and gulp it down with a look of disgust. The whistling street sweeper swerves to avoid a flock of office workers hurrying to get to their desks on time. When I look up, the almost stationary clouds form the same changeable shapes as the blotch on the ceiling above my bed. I lean against a wall and the cold stone feels comforting. I drowse there for a while, with the generous permission of my body.